


Cherubim

by veausy



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Fluff without Plot, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-03 01:24:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12738201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veausy/pseuds/veausy
Summary: Reaching out one finger carefully, El brushed it over his bottom lip, watching pink skin stretch under the pressure. Mike stayed asleep.





	Cherubim

El woke up feeling warm, something soft cushioning her face and a brilliant ray of light caressing her cheek from the window. She was used to dozing in Mike’s room ever since Hop’s resolve had broken in April and he’d consented to letting her visit the boys as long as their parents were in the house. Mike’s room had a unique, sweet-linen smell, though she couldn’t really place it; every whiff of it filled up her lungs and nourished her.

Sunday naps were her favorite. Most other days, she was being exposed to newness, every experience becoming something she imprinted upon her soul as she tried to navigate the world she’d seen so little of. Sunday naps were just her and Mike, not learning, not speaking, not translating what she heard or saw into something she could understand; they just lay together and slept, the safest and softest moments of her life.

Her eyelids drifted open slowly, and she found herself facing a wall. Her head was pillowed on several folds of Mike’s comforter, and Mike was behind her somewhere, wheezing softly. Much as the other party members loved to tease them for cuddling, she and Mike didn’t actually touch very much in their free time.

El knew what cuddling was, hard not to after five or fifty mentions of it by Dustin and Lucas, but she wasn’t as comfortable with physical contact as everyone around her seemed to be. Touch was important. Max and Lucas held hands a lot, and Dustin and Lucas had many complicated handshakes they often did for no apparent reason in the middle of D & D. She even saw Mike slinging a loose arm over Will’s shoulders once and sitting like that through an entire viewing of Star Wars.

But touch had always meant, for her, another person’s presence – and in the laboratory another person was never there to cuddle.

She turned to her other side carefully, eyes traveling down Mike’s profile as he lay flat on his back, eyes twitching a bit in sleep. His nose sloped softly up into the air and dropped back into the full shape of his lips, which had drifted open and looked slack now. Reaching out one finger carefully, El brushed it over his bottom lip, watching pink skin stretch under the pressure. Mike stayed asleep.

A car honk down the street startled her, drawing a sharp gasp from her throat and making her hands drop to clench in the sheets as she sat up. As the car zoomed on by, she relaxed, crossing her legs under herself and pulling the blankets up over her shoulders to stay cocooned in the heat she and Mike had created together underneath.

Over the last few weeks, she’d become accustomed to the occasional distant noises of leaf blowers and voices and cars speeding by, which she’d heard none of in her previous life.

The yelling was fairly new.

She’d hear it sometimes when they all sat in the basement, and one time she heard it from outside the front door – but it stopped when she rang the bell and Karen came to let her in.

Mike didn’t talk about it or even acknowledge it much in front of the others, just slamming the door closed or rolling his eyes and raising his own voice to tune it out. But El knew it bothered him, because he became twitchier, more irritable afterward. When it was only El with him and the yelling happened, he’d usually disappear for a moment and come back with Holly in his arms, keeping her in the bedroom or in the basement with him and El until the yelling stopped.

El liked that, since she saw so little of Holly otherwise. She was too little to enjoy what Mike’s friends enjoyed doing, but big enough that she wanted her big brother to pay attention to her. El always joined Holly in coloring pictures and playing with dolls, foreign activities that were very immersing but also completely incomprehensible to her. After a few days of this, Mike pointed out that Holly seemed to like El the most out of all Mike’s friends. El liked that, too.

The yelling was getting louder now, enough that El’s eyes dropped to Mike’s face, afraid he’d wake up. Karen had stomped past the door, shouting something into the hall, and a lower, grumblier voice answered from the living room, muffled by the walls between them.

Yelling was generally bad, that much El knew. Papa had never yelled at her, and when she did something wrong he’d simply lock her up. But yelling with Hopper was always fair: they both could yell, they both could stay out of lock-up, and they both were forgiven afterward. Though yelling felt horrible in the moment, it added up to something better than what she’d known before, because Hopper didn’t take away her dignity. Dignity, she’d discovered, was also important. She was almost never afraid anymore.

Yelling meant disagreement, unless it was happy yelling – but El was still learning that distinction. Karen and Ted yelled a lot, and El wasn’t sure if that was different from how they were before she’d started visiting the house. Sometimes Karen’s eyes would land on El and she’d seem flustered, embarrassed, and the yelling would stop for the day. She wondered if she should go out there now, make herself seen so they’d stop and let Mike sleep.

Before she could pursue the thought, Mike shifted, hand rising to his face and rubbing his eyes slowly, a deep sigh whispering through his nose. His hand dropped after a moment, but his eyes stayed closed, though El knew he was awake. She sat still, watching him.

His long, curly hair was fanned out around his head, so long now that sometimes she woke up during naps because it was tickling her face. His jaw was more pronounced too, both from puberty (Hopper had told her) and from how thin he was from sprouting up in height. El spent half of her time at this house eating, simply because Mike ate so much, but it didn’t show on his frame at all.

His collar bone was peeking out over the neck of his sweater, and El extended her finger again, tapping the skin there gently. She knew her own body inside and out, having had it as her only entertainment for many years during long hours – and sometimes days – in solitary confines. Having the ability to see, touch, and smell another person, whom she trusted, still amazed her. Mike never minded the touches, though El tended to startle him because she made no warning. Now, his eyes popped open and slowly focused on her, squinting because the sun from the window was behind now her, falling onto his pillow in saturated yellow.

He smiled softly. “You look like an angel.”

El blinked. “Angel?”

“They’re magical creatures, like in D & D, with powers. They’re very pure and good, and usually they have a little circle of light around their head.” He looked embarrassed of his own words, but his finger still pointed abstractly. “Like you do now.”

El smiled back at him, feeling her cheeks grow hot. Sometimes when he looked at her like that, it made her feel too small, as though she could not possibly be what he thought he was seeing. She was afraid to disappoint him.

Another loud shout came from some distant part of the house, startling them both and making them glance at the door.

Mike sighed again and began to sit up, but El put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “Why do they yell?”

Mike winced, his cheeks reddening quickly, and shifted, dislodging her hand. “They’re … going through a bad time.”

El leaned closer. “A bad time?”

Sliding up to lean against the wall, Mike cleared his throat. El moved with him, closing the space he’d put between them and trying to understand his discomfort. He stared down at his lap as he spoke, his voice hoarse and low like it had been ever since she'd seen him the night of the gate. It thrilled her, how different he was now, and still very much the same. “Sometimes marriages don’t work out. Like, Nancy and Steve didn’t get married, but they were together and then they split up. That happens all the time, and usually this kind of arguing is a sign that it’s falling apart.”

El nodded. “You … don’t like it?”

“Well, they’re my parents. I never knew a time when they weren’t both in the house with me in the morning, and in the evening, and at dinner … When parents split up, it changes everything.”

“Change is bad?”

Mike shrugged one shoulder. “This kind is, yeah.”

El looked down at his hand, which was picking jerkily at the loose threads sticking up out of the old wool comforter. Touch was important. She lifted both of her hands and closed them around his. He looked up at her, surprised, but his fingers interlaced themselves with hers almost instantly, pulling the jumble of knuckles closer to himself.

“Will’s parents split up when he was little. He barely even saw his dad after that.”

“Will was sad?”

“Not really.” Mike seemed to reconsider, shaking his head. “I just hate when this stuff happens at all. Being separated from someone that you – that matters to you, I don’t understand why anyone would do it on purpose. It’s so stupid.” His eyes were back on his lap again.

There was a fog that hovered in El’s mind almost constantly, a heavy thing that obscured her full view of what was around her. Mike had been the first to make that fog melt, and steadily every other person in her life now was breaking through that fog day by day, helping her to see better. But some of that fog would probably remain for a long time. Now, El had a rare moment of clarity, the kind that happened when she heard a set of words that by themselves didn’t mean much and then saw something that also didn’t translate into what she understood, but together they cleared up the fuzzy gray clouds and let her see everything fully for a brief moment.

Her gaze slid over Mike’s face, drinking in the sleepy roundness of it that was slowly wearing off. “It won’t happen. With us.”

When he met her eyes, he looked as perplexed as she felt, disbelieving that she’d actually deciphered his message somehow, amazed that she could. But his expression always held some other element in it that she herself didn’t feel – a kind of gratification, like she’d done something that he knew she could. “You think?”

El shook her head. “I know.”

His face broke into a wide smile, eyes never leaving hers, and he shook his head lightly to dislodge his hair, making some of it fall into his face and hide him from her view. She  brushed it back, tucking it behind his ear. The curls were tight, springing back from where she’d put them almost immediately and landing in his face again. She giggled, battling it for a few moments before Mike reached up and grasped her wrists, pulling them to his chest. “Why do you trust me so much?”

El shrank back, bewildered.

“You trusted me on that night when we found you in '83, and we were all just kids. You didn’t even know me.”

“I could tell.”

“Tell what?”

“The way you looked at me. You were good.”

Mike’s eyes searched hers, waiting. She didn’t know what he was asking.

“You didn’t look like you were … curious,” he nodded at her proper pronunciation of the word, and she continued, “or like you were confused.” She’d never say it, but Lucas and Dustin had. They liked her now, she knew, but they’d never stopped being confused by her. “You didn’t want anything, you just liked me.”

Mike made a funny face. “When we found you standing in the rain in the middle of the night, I’m pretty sure I was really freaking confused, El.”

“No,” she said, frustrated that she couldn’t make him understand. He might have been confused, but he didn’t act as though she owed him an explanation. He never demanded for her to justify how she looked or who she was in order to be acceptable to him. He just let her be whatever she was, and he was prepared to like whatever she ended up being. But these were feelings she couldn’t express, ideas that were still only vaguely taking shape in her own head. Mike didn’t know how good he was. “You’re good, Mike. I know it.”

Mike twisted the neck of his sweater, glancing tiredly at the door when another shrill shout resounded through the house.

“Is Holly here?”

He shook his head. “Sleepover party.” El didn’t know what that meant, but “sleepover” and “party” were usually things a person did at someone else’s house, so El nodded.

Turning to the door with purpose now, she squinted, tensing as she channeled her psychokinesis, and slowly the voices quieted and faded to an inaudible lull, quieter even than the voices coming from the street.

Mike’s eyes widened and then dropped to her nose. “How are you doing that? You aren’t even bleeding!”

El brushed her face with her sleeve mostly out of self-consciousness, but tipped forward anyway, tucking her forehead up under Mike’s jaw. Touch was important. “This doesn’t take as much. Just sound waves.”

Mike, keeping the back of her head cradled in one of his hands, scooted them down the wall slowly until they were lying on the pillows again, staring up at the ceiling. The rays of sunlight peeking through the window had shifted slightly, landing on their chests now, and El traced the shapes they left on the blanket they’d draped over themselves. Mike used a finger to trace a circle, shaped by a hole in the blinds. “Halo.”

El repeated, “Halo.”

“That’s the circle of light that angels have around their heads. It’s also a name for the circle of light that shows up around planets from refraction through different ice crystals in space.”

El smiled. Mike loved magic, but he loved science even more.

“Angels,” she murmured quietly, breath brushing against the skin of his neck, which pebbled with goosebumps in response. She could feel his heart beat, thudding louder like it was trying to reach her. 

At some point, she fell back into a comfortable doze, the sensation of Mike tracing the halo that was sitting on her shoulder lulling them both.

**Author's Note:**

> These two are so soft, and so pure. I am capable of nothing but fluff.
> 
> But the show didn't deal with the Wheelers' crumbling marriage, and I thought someone might as well.


End file.
